51³Ô¹ÏÍø

Sir John O'Brien interview; ENGLAND: INT Sir John O'Brien (Secretary to Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse) interview via internet SOT (part 1 of 2) Can we get an idea of the scale of the number of people this has and will affect? - Certainly many hundreds of thousands - One subset is the number of kids affected by education carried out by these organizations that's quarter of a million - Many hundreds of thousands can be said off the back of that Report found limited protection for children in religious organisations, on that point what else did the report find? - There's no real safeguarding policy in many of these organisations - If you have a policy people know what to expect - This is shocking because recent evidence show no real basic policies exist - Barriers to reporting that are particular to religion - Religious leaders are held up as people to be revered and trusted, which makes it harder to report - Senior leaders are often male which makes it difficult for female victims to report that abuse - Religious leaders are seen to be trusted and that they should be forgiven rather than reporting their abuse - This is used to protect the organisation and prevent child sexual abuse being properly investigated What do the government need to do now to tackle this? - The panel's second recommendation is that the nature of these places mean they aren't covered by the OFSTED inspection regime - Legislation covering this needs to change, these types of educational establishments need to be covered by OFSTED - This would mean OFSTED could go inspect and ensure things like standards are in place in education and safeguarding - That would make it much harder for abuse to happen and easier to deal with when it does